Debian Project News - December 8th, 2010

Welcome to this year's seventeenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.7 released

A new update for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny has been released. Due to an issue with the preparation, the linux-2.6 packages included in this point release do not incorporate the security fixes released in DSA 2110-1. DSA 2126-1, which has just been released, includes the updates from both DSA 2110-1 and the linux-2.6 packages from this point release. All other recent security updates have been added as well as some fixes for critical issues. New CD and DVD images as well as update CDs and DVDs are available.

Debian WWW Sprint

Gerfried Fuchs announced an upcoming Debian WWW Sprint to finalise the last bits that are needed to get the new design for the website happening. The sprint will happen on the weekend of December 17 to 19 in Vienna, Austria. People interested in attending with a somewhat firm knowledge of CSS are welcome to get in contact as soon as possible. A preliminary agenda for the meeting is available.

ZFS support in Squeeze

Robert Millan is pleased to announce that the last missing patch for ZFS support has been added to the official Installer. This updates the already existing ZFS integration into the Debian Installer we relayed less than two months ago.
This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS.

Interview with Debian Developer Colin Watson

Raphaël Hertzog published an interview with long-time Debian Developer Colin Watson, who has been taking care of man-db for more than ten years. He has done a lot of work on the debian-installer, especially the partitioner, and plans to design a new interface to handle disk naming consistently for Wheezy. He also works on GRUB 2, which may be the best opportunity to reduce the need for the current mass of boot loaders. Colin Watson also provides information about Ubuntu and what persons he admires most among Debian developers.

Further This week in Debian interviews

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the This week in Debian podcast have been published: with Lars Wirzenius, author of Debian's Upstream Guide and member of the Front Desk project; and with Jeremiah Foster, discussing Maemo and Debian derivatives.

Other news

Final and official dates for DebConf11 have been published: DebCamp will be held from July 17 to 23 2011, followed by DebConf from July 24 to 30, in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Petter Reinholdtsen produced some statistics of distribution usage from almost 100,000 computers registered with popularity-contest: more than 60% of them are running Lenny, the current stable release.

Paul Wise sent an update about the Debian derivatives front desk, reporting about what has already been achieved, and sharing thoughts about what could be done in the future. He proposes quarterly derivatives meeting on IRC and annual face-to-face meetings at DebConf, and also invites updates of the census of Debian derivatives.

New Debian Contributors

4 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, 4 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and 7 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, Sebastian Reichel, Jonathan Wiltshire, Michael Hanke, Michael Gilbert, Aron Xu, Christian Hofstaedtler, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyerand, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre, Andreas Rönnquist, Tim Gokcen, Daniel Stender, Iker Salmón San Millán, Hector Oron and Kilian Valkhof into our project!

Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 Squeeze, is currently affected by 246 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 79 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Alexander also noted that the number of release-critical bugs needing to be solved in Squeeze dropped by a stunning 40 bugs in just one week!

There are also more detailed statistics as well as some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): openssl, linux-2.6, wireshark, libxml2, and krb5. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released an advisory for the package: znc. Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Volatile Team released two update announcements for the packages: tor and clamav. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list (and the separate backports list and volatile list) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others):

Please note that due to the freeze of the upcoming Debian 6.0 Squeeze acceptance of new packages has almost ceased.

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by David Prévot and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl.